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Experiments on orphans

Experimentation on orphans features prominently throughout our thriller series The Orphan Trilogy – not surprising given our central characters are products of the Pedemont Orphanage, a secretive institution on Chicago’s impoverished South Side, where experimentation is the rule, not the exception.

“I’m one of twenty-three orphan prodigies. We were created using genetic engineering technologies that have been suppressed from the mainstream. I’m at least half a century ahead of our times in terms of official science. The embryologists who created me selected the strongest genes from about a thousand sperm donors then used in-vitro fertilization to impregnate my mother and other women.” –The Ninth Orphan

Keen to maintain at least a level of believability, we spent a considerable amount of time researching this somewhat unsavory and unpalatable topic. What we found makes for disturbing reading.

Records of experimentation on children and orphans are often indistinguishable, and for good reason: in many if not most cases the children involved are, or were, orphans. Those who weren’t technically classed as such were from one-parent families where, for one reason or another, that parent – usually the mother – was absent or negligent. In which case the child might as well have been an orphan.

Those records date right back to biblical times – to experiments performed on young Jewish prisoners in the Book of Daniel.

To remain reasonably contemporary, we chose to limit most of our research to the 1930’s onwards.

The man tried to shut out the voices from his childhood which now echoed in his head. He could hear the other orphans calling his name. Nine! Suppressed memories of his time spent at the Pedemont Orphanage surfaced from the depths of his psyche.–The Ninth Orphan

The very first case that caught our eye was tame compared to others that followed, but nevertheless was devastating for those children involved. Popularly known as The Monster Study, it entailed conducting an experiment on 22 children – including 10 orphans – in Davenport, Iowa, in 1939.

The brainchild of one Wendell Johnson, himself a stutterer, at the University of Iowa, the experiment was conducted by grad student Mary Tudor who was tasked with giving half the children positive speech therapy and half negative speech therapy. Those in the former group were praised for their speech fluency while those in the latter were ridiculed and told they were stutterers.

Wendell Johnson…architect of The Monster Study.

Most disturbingly, many of the orphan children in the ‘negative’ group suffered psychologically and developed permanent speech problems even though they were once normal speaking children.

Mary Tudor…conducted the experiment.

The experiment, which was cynically described as The Monster Study by Johnson’s peers, coincided with news of Nazi experiments on Jewish and other children early in World War Two, and so was kept hidden from the public at large.

In a New York Times article dated March 16, 2003, columnist Gretchen Reynolds says Johnson’s findings about the nature of stuttering, once it has begun, remains the accepted wisdom to this day. “The disorder does respond to conditioning, and once established, stuttering can have a ruinous momentum. Often, the worse someone stutters, the more he fears speaking, and the worse his speech becomes.”

Reynolds adds, “It is an ugly thing, after all, to experiment on orphans. And Johnson’s admirers, who still are legion, struggle to understand why he proposed and designed the project.”

No doubt many assumed Johnson believed it was okay to sacrifice a few to help the many other children who stuttered. Theends justify the means mindset has been the impetus behind many a cruel medical or social experiment.

Children, including some orphans, involved in The Monster Study.

Wikipedia reports that the University of Iowa publicly apologized for The Monster Study in 2001. It quotes University of Iowa assistant professor of speech pathology [name redacted] as saying “we still don’t know what causes stuttering, but the ‘Iowa’ way of approaching study and treatment is still heavily influenced by Johnson, but with an added emphasis on speech production”.

Well that’s all fine and dandy, but what about the experiment’s subjects? By all accounts the State of Iowa awarded six of the orphan children close to US$1 millionfor lifelong psychological and emotional scars caused by six months of torment during the study. And before her death, Tudor expressed deep regret, claiming Johnson should have done more to reverse thenegative effects on the orphan children’s speech.

Too little, too late, we say.

Peering down through the vent, Kentbridge couldn’t believe his eyes: the vent opened up into an underground base occupied by children – boys and girls. Nomore than five or six years old, they seemed to be hypnotized and moved around like zombies. As some moved out of sight, others came into Kentbridge’s line of vision. Dozens of them. The senior agent looked aghast at Nine, then returned his attention to the macabre scene below. –The Ninth Orphan

The Lebensborn Program

The Monster Study pales into insignificance next to the horror stories that have come out of Nazi Germany – such as the Lebensborn Program, which we touched on briefly in Chapter 2.

To recap,Lebensborn was just one of many Nazi programs incorporating mind control techniques and was a pet project of Heinrich Himmler. The aim of the SS-backed program was to increase the Aryan population and it involved kidnapping thousands of very young children – including orphans – who were deemed to be ‘racially pure’. They were interned in camps where they were subjected to mind control tactics and brainwashed to think like Nazis.

Young inductees into the Nazis’Lebensborn Program.

In the respected German news site, Spiegel Online International, columnist David Crossland reported (in November 2006) that after decades of hushed shame, the children of the Lebensborn program to create a blond, blue-eyed master race have started to speak out.

“Topic number one is the painful search for their true parents,” said Crossland. “And then that nagging question: Was my father a war criminal?”

Crossland observed that the children of the Nazis’ Lebensborn (‘Spring of Life’) program to create an Aryan master race were starting to go public with their plight and were renewing efforts to find out who their true parents were.

Uncle Adolph (Hitler) and one of the Lebensborn children.

Reports from a variety of sources reveal the Nazis kidnapped children from Russia, the Ukraine and throughout Europe. Poland and Yugoslavia figure prominently with estimates of the number of Polish children kidnapped ranging from 20,000 to 200,000.

By all accountsthe children were tested then placed in one of three groups, including one for those not wanted. The unfortunate members of that group were killed or dispatched to concentration camps.

Unfortunately, such horrors didn’t end with Nazi Germany.

It gradually dawned on Nine that Francis’ abduction could somehow be connected to the Black Forest orphanage or one of the other underground medical labs Omega was rumored to be operating elsewhere in the world. Whilst with Omega, Nine had heard the rumors that the agency was conducting illegal scientific experiments on genetically enhanced children at various isolated labs. He’d seen it for himself in Germany, and didn’t doubt for a minute there could be others. –The Orphan Uprising

The Duplessis Orphans

In the 1940’s, the government of Quebec, Canada, in league with the Roman Catholic Church, began falsely certifying thousands of orphans as mentally ill and confining them in psychiatric institutions.

Why? The short answer: money.

It happened during the tenure of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis in the 1940’s and 1950’s when a change in government policy saw higher federal subsidies paid out to hospitals than to orphanages. One shameful result of this was indecent numbers of healthy children were hastily diagnosed as psychotic to capitalize on the increased subsidies.

As CBC Canada reports on its CBC Digital Archives site, the diagnoses were always swift – the children went to bed orphans and woke up psychiatric patients.

Here’s excerpts from that report:

“Some children allegedly endured lobotomies, electroshock, straitjackets and abuse. For the rest of their lives they would struggle to bring attention to their story and demand compensation. They called themselves the Duplessis Orphans.

“Born out of wedlock and deemed “children of sin,” thousands of Quebec children were cut off from society and sent to orphanages… Many were improperly diagnosed as mentally incompetent. The diagnosis would be a lifelong sentence; the orphans endured a difficult and sometimes abusive childhood…the orphans…have organized and are seeking compensation. With each day, more and more people are coming forward with claims of abuse.”

The Duplessis Orphans…stories of lobotomies, electroshock, straitjackets and abuse.

Among those survivors seeking compensation, some have asked the Quebec government to exhume bodies in an abandoned Montreal cemetery thought to hold the remains of orphans subjected to medical experiments. The survivors are pushing for autopsies to be performed.

Naylor inspected the documents. They included files and photos Nine had uplifted from the Berlin journalist Naylor had ordered him to execute a year earlier. Among them were graphic photos of orphans who had been subjected to horrific scientific experiments. –The Ninth Orphan

Syphilis testing in Guatemala

Now here’s an experiment that defies belief. It involved the proven and acknowledged infection of Guatemalan orphans, schoolchildren, psychiatric patients, prison inmates and many others with venereal diseases in the late 1940’s by – wait for it – American public health doctors!

Through the late Nineties and early 2000’s rumors of deliberate infection of Guatemalans became whispers until finally, in 2005, hard evidence of what one senior US health official described as “a dark chapter in the history of medicine”was produced.

The world learned that for years American public health doctors deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and other venereal diseases. Apparently, the reason for this was to test the effectiveness of penicillin on those infections.

International Rights Advocates claim more than 5000 Guatemalans were experimented on and, in the course of those experiments, over 1000 were infected with venereal diseases.

Guatemalan youngsters among those experimented on.

One experiment entailed syphilis-infected prostitutes sleeping with prisoners in Guatemalan prisons. It transpires that prisoners not infected were administered the bacteria by injection or other means. While those who contracted syphilis were given antibiotics, it remains unclear exactly how many – if any – were cured.

The experiments, funded by America’s National Institutes of Health, were facilitated by Guatemalan health officials without the informed consent of subjects. Reports show at least 80 deaths resulted – with some estimates being much higher.

In October 2010 the US Government officially apologized for the actions of American citizens involved in the whole ugly business.

In a joint statement,Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: “Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”

In a twist to the revelation, the New York Times issue of October 1, 2010 reported – beneath the banner headline U.S. apologizes for syphilis tests in Guatemala – that “The public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study.”

The study referred to was the US Public Health Service’s unethical and infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment that saw African-American males with syphilis deliberately left untreated for 40 years (from 1932 to 1972). But that’s a whole other story.

Getting back to the Guatemala experiments, a (US) Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues concluded that, after an intensive nine-month investigation, “The Guatemala experiments involved gross violations of ethics…It is the Commission’s firm belief that many of the actions undertaken in Guatemala were especially egregious moral wrongs because many of the individuals involved held positions of public institutional responsibility.”

Our research into this experiment has not uncovered reports of successful prosecutions against any of the American health officials or medical staffers involved in this travesty. Nor has it revealed whether any of the experiment’s subjects have received compensation for the atrocities committed. We can only assume the answer is No to both those questions.

Kentbridge tensed as white-coated scientists appeared below. They flashed psychedelic lights into the children’s eyes, putting them into even more of a trance-like state. To his horror, the senior agent noticed the children had bizarre physical defects. Some had multi-colored skin; others had adult-like facial hair; one young girl had the face of an elderly woman. –The Ninth Orphan

Disproven allegations

In a series of articles first published in the early to mid-2000’s, dogged journalist Liam Scheff, who has been described by at least one mainstream US media outlet as a ‘HIV denialist’, claimed cruel AIDS experiments on children – usually orphans – were being conducted in New York’s Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC).

Scheff claimed his investigations revealed the children were being force-fed numerous drugs after allegedly testing positive to HIV/AIDS tests.

The allegations were vehemently denied by ICC staffers, and a subsequent New York State Department of Health investigation found none of the allegations could be substantiated. The department also indicated that the accusers appeared to subscribe to the unpopular theory that HIV does not cause AIDS.

One major media outlet pointed out that the allegations came from one person (Scheff) and weren’t backed up with real names or evidence of any kind.

When Scheff couldn’t get any traction for his allegations with mainstream media, he turned to online media to air his grievances.

Okay, so what does this have to do with experiments on orphans? Apparently…nothing at all. We mention it only to remind any readers who may consider themselves conspiracy theorists how important it is not to believe every conspiracy theory out there.

By the same token, if you’ve picked up anything from the preceding chapters, you’d have to agree only a fool would automatically accept as gospel everything officialdom tells us.

Nine went on to explain the notes he’d recovered from the journalist left no doubt Omega was manufacturing a new breed of genetically-superior orphans. Kentbridge’s mind was racing as Nine brought him up to speed. The program had obviously changed out of sight since The Pedemont Project. Why wasn’t I told? Now, it appeared, the emphasis was on radical medical experimentation. –The Ninth Orphan

Liam Scheff’s apparently fictional allegations are eerily reminiscent of some of our fictional musings in The Orphan Trilogy – in particular in books one and three, The Ninth Orphan and The Orphan Uprising – in which the ninth-born orphan visits clandestine orphanages and medical labs on three continents.

And besides all the true accounts of orphan experimentation covered in this chapter, what if there are more advanced, secretive experiments on orphans and children generally that we never hear of?